This blog was last updated on June 27, 2021

With the changes in Brazil set to take effect in December of 2014 and Chile mandates coming even earlier – November 2014, don’t forget about the other mandated countries – specifically Argentina.

There are currently more than 300,000 companies that were mandated to transition to electronic invoicing between April and August of 2014 and many others were mandated in previous years.  In these articles, I often discuss the technical requirements, but I wanted to take the time to discuss the process effect in finance and SAP after the government approval.

You will often hear me describe “Dynamic Sequencing” – an important issue to get your invoices validated by the government web services. However, this is about getting the appropriate approvals.  Now the problem beyond sequencing for global SAP templates that is not often discussed is known as: Billing/Accounting Document Posting.

The law specifies that general ledger postings should not occur unless and until the ODN number has been confirmed and approved by the AFIP.  Considering this, it is not generally considered a good standard practice to persist the billing document and create the accounting documents in advance of ODN approval from the government. 

This can be challenging for many companies because they often use the same SAP billing document types for multiple countries in the region, and corporate IT teams don’t want to setup special posting behavior just for Argentina. 

In order to ensure your accounting systems comply with local best practices but also simplify your global SAP implementation, you should look for solutions in Argentina that include “parking/blocking logic” to prevent the billing document from generating accounting documents until the ODN number has been confirmed by the AFIP. 

This way, once the “park” has been released, the customer can trigger its standard posting behavior and rest assured that the ODN reference number will always match the values populated in the accounting tables and need not be reversed or updated afterward. This approach allows companies to implement compliant behavior for Argentina where it’s needed without affecting other countries where the same billing document types may also be used.